Reading the Psychosomatic in Medical and Popular Culture

This volume tackles conflicts in the provider-patient relationship; uses the psychosomatic as a lens for theorizing the self in culture; and examines the metaphorical potential of the psychosomatic in fictional narrative. Taking an interdisciplinary and international approach, it is aimed at scholars of health, cultural studies and literature.

Carol-Ann Farkas is Associate Professor of English in the School of Arts and Sciences at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (MCPHS), Boston, USA.

Introduction. The Psychosomatic as Nothing, Something, and Everything 1. Psychosomatic Patients and Providers: at the Mercy of a Medical System 2. Narrative Medicine and Fibromyalgia 3. Medically Unexplained Symptoms and the Ethics of Diagnosis: 4. Feeding Your Feelings: Emotional Eating in Mid-Twentieth Century America 5. Impossible Illnesses: Decolonizing Psychosomatic Medicine 6. Narrative Coherence and Medical Explanations of Psychosomatic Pain 7. Medicalstudentitis as a Rite of Passage in Popular Literature 8. Women with Long-Term Exhaustion in Fictional Literature 9. The Brute Within: 10. Poor Things